Glenn Greenwald vs. transgender people

Glenn Greenwald is an American author and lawyer who has made a number of comments critical of “gender ideology.” Greenwald generally supports the civil rights of trans adults but has made a number of comments supportive of sex segregationist and LGB separatist positions.

Greenwald falsely claims there has been a “decrease in the lesbian population,” supposedly because they are becoming trans men instead. Greenwald bases this on a claim made by LGB erasure conspiracy theorist Katie Herzog via Andrew Sullivan. The poll Greenwald cites shows the lesbian population has steadily increased with each generation.
Greenwald also claims trans people may come out to “catapult up the ladder of oppression that absolutely confers concrete benefits.”
Greenwald believes some people may even falsely claim to be trans in order to enjoy these benefits, likening them to white people who claim to have a different ethnicity.
Greenwald initially promoted anti-trans extremist Chaya Raichik and the Libs of TikTok account.
Greenwald is suspicious of people who claim a bisexual identity while in a “straight” relationship.
Greenwald is suspicious of healthcare for trans minors, citing a controversial New York Times piece by Emily Bazelon.
Greenwald has questioned how trans prisoners are housed in sex-segregated facilities, citing complaints from cis women.
Greenwald hosts the System Upgrade podcast that has had many anti-trans guests.
Greenwald promotes the ex-trans movement of political “detransitioners.”
Greenwald promotes the social contagion theory about increased numbers of adolescents and young people coming out, suggesting that therapists and teachers may be priming them by suggesting people are trans too often.
Greenwald had a falling-out with trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a former friend who said “I think that he is a dangerous person. The people he’s aligned himself with are very dangerous.”

Background

Glenn Edward Greenwald was born on March 6, 1967 in Queens in New York City to Arlene and Daniel Greenwald. The family soon moved to Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, and Greenwald graduated from Nova High School in Davie, Florida. While in high school, Greenwald unsuccessfully ran for local political offices. Greenwald earned a bachelor’s degree from George Washington University in 1990 and a law degree from New York University School of Law in 1994.

From 1994 to 1995 Greenwald practiced law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. In 1996, Greenwald co-founded Greenwald Christoph & Holland, focusing on consititutional law, first amendment rights, and civil rights. Greenwald wound down the practice in 2005 to focus on journalism and political writing.

In 2005, Greenwald started the blog Unclaimed Territory, which moved to Salon in 2007. Greenwald frequently focused on national security issues. In 2012, Greenwald began writing for the American edition of The Guardian. In 2013, Greenwald was a key figure in reporting on the global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden, which won a 2014 Pulitzer Prize. According to a staff profile at The Intercept_:

He was the debut winner, along with “Democracy Now’s” Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the abusive detention conditions of Chelsea Manning. For his 2013 NSA reporting, he received the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting; the Gannett Foundation Award for investigative journalism and the Gannett Foundation Watchdog Journalism Award; the Esso Premio for Excellence in Investigative Reporting in Brazil (he was the first non-Brazilian to win); and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award. Along with Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras, Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. The NSA reporting he led for The Guardian was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill founded The Intercept in 2014. Greenwald resigned in 2020, claiming censorship. Greenwald then began posting on Substack, becoming one of the platform’s largest newsletters.

In 2005, Greenwald married David Miranda (1985–2023), who later was a Brazilian politician. They have three children.

System Update

Since 2020, Greenwald has hosted the podcast System Update and has had on a number of anti-trans guests, including:

2021 Twitter thread on Gallup poll

On February 24, 2021, Greenwald posted impressions about a Gallup poll on LGBT identities:

Some really fascinating findings in this big new Gallup survey on Americans identifying as “LGBT.” It should lead to lots of deeper investigation to understand what explains some of these astronomical changes, but for now, a few points to note:
There’s been a huge explosion in the number of Americans identifying as LGBT. Close to 1 out of every 5 Gen Z so identifies (17%). That’s more than a 4-fold increase from Gen X (4%). But almost all of the increase comes from those identifying as bi or trans, not gay or lesbian:
Of Americans now claiming “bi” identity, the vast majority of them in long-term relationships are in opposite-sex relationships (33%) rather than same-sex ones (3.7%). So 10 times more people who identify as “bi” live in hetero-appearing relationships than gay/lesbian ones:
Finally, as famed lesbian @kittypurrzog notes, there are now — among Millennials and Gen Z — more people identifying as trans than lesbian. She has previously argued that masculine girls are now encouraged to identify as trans, causing a decrease in the lesbian population:
Here’s Katie’s article [for Andrew Sullivan] exploring whether the disappearance of lesbian culture is due to the encouragement which masculine girls receive — from the society, therapists, health care workers, etc. — to identify as trans, not as lesbian women: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7
Clearly, the massive increase in Americans self-identifying as LGBT — an increase due overwhelmingly to more “bi” and trans self-identifiers — is partially a function of increased societal acceptance. But that’s clearly not the only factor. And I doubt it’s the primary one.

In a video response to the subsequent public pushback, Greenwald expanded on these views, saying in part:

How do I know there are other causes generating this increase? Well, because you can go online and listen to people who have said that they believed and concluded that they were trans. Young people speaking very intelligently and thoughtfully and articulately who both concluded that they were trans, who started hormone therapy, even went through anatomically-altering irreversible surgeries to transition, who ultimately realize that they were not in fact trans. And then they entered the phase of what they called “detransitioning.” And what many of them say – not all – some of them say, “I detransitioned because I realized that to be trans in this society was just too difficult.” But many of them say, “I detransitioned because I’m not trans.”

So then the question arises, so why did you conclude in the first place that you were trans? And many of them say, “Because the society we have encourages you to believe that.” If you’re struggling with a mental illness, so many mental health professionals now will immediately say, “Well, maybe you’re trans.” And you’re 16 or 17 or 18 or 20 and you listen to those suggestions. And of course you’re influenced by them. The culture around you as well, the peer pressure is enormous. We all know that who have been teenagers or young adults. So if you see lots of people claiming bi and trans status, or even gay and lesbian status. you may think, “Well, I’m probably that, too,” or “I want to be that, too.”

We have seen lots of cases where white people have gotten caught claiming falsely to be people of color, especially in academic institutions where there is a benefit accorded to someone who can claim that status, that we all know – this is the thing we’re not supposed to admit – we all know that in certain societal sectors like academia, like journalism, like online culture for young people, being able to say “I’m not a straight white male,” or “straight white female, I’m actually bi and have a rainbow flag in my avatar,” or “I’m trans or nonbinary,” confers benefits. In arguments, people will say that person has to be deferred to because they’re oppressed or discriminated against in a way that others aren’t.

Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manning is a former American military intelligence specialist who served seven years in prison for espionage and other crimes after releasing a trove of sensitive US military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in 2010. Manning came out as transgender in 2013. Manning’s sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017. Greenwald was a prominent supporter of Manning, both publicly and privately.

In September 2021, Manning made a public split from Greenwald. Manning had been enmeshed with a group of far-right figures like Mike Cernovich, purportedly to gather information. As Greenwald began aligning more closely with similar reactionaries like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Tucker Carlson, Manning finally reached a breaking point. Manning posted on Twitter: “glenn greenwald, i don’t have $10,000 right now but if i get it i want to send it back to you from a donation you once did. i can’t deal with this anymore. im terrified of you and everything you do. you’re greedy, unprincipled, and im embarrassed for ever considering you a friend.”

Greenwald responded: “Friendships that depend on political agreement were never “friendships,” just cynical transactions. When she was in prison trying repeatedly to kill herself, I was one of the only one who visited, spent hours on the phone, raising money for her. No good deed goes unpunished.”

In a 2022 interview, Manning said:

I can’t tell you how hard that was—how deeply hard that was. It took me years to navigate me saying something about him. […] One of the problems I’ve been having is that one of the things he does is he feeds off the engagement and the fighting. I wanted to go on record: I don’t want a beef with Glenn. I don’t want to feed his fire. I don’t want to engage with that. I said what I said, and I meant what I said. I have many reasons. I think that he is a dangerous person. The people he’s aligned himself with are very dangerous. Whenever I saw warning signs, I looked the other way. People were telling me things, and I ignored it. It’s the most problematic relationship that I’ve ever had in my life. I was quiet for years, and I regret that. I should have said something sooner. […] I had agonized over it for years and it came from a very personal place, and I emotionally struggled to come forward with this. It truly was a very deep, personal moment for me.

Joe Rogan Experience interview

In a wide-ranging discussion on The Joe Rogan Experience in 2020, Greenwald compared trans women competing in sex-segregated competitive sports to doping or cheating.

Callin, Rumble and Locals

Callin was a “social podcasting” app that was launched by Axel Ericsson and David Sacks in 2021 as a competitor to Clubhouse. Greenwald was one of the first people to sign an exclusive deal with Callin in 2021. Greenwald hosted The Glenn Greenwald Podcast and co-hosted Unredacted with Andray Domise. In May 2023, Rumble acquired Callin, and Greenwald moved to Rumble and Locals, a crowdfunding site created by Dave Rubin as an alternative to Patreon.

Vanguard interview

In a 2022 interview on The Vanguard, the hosts pressed Greenwald about engaging in multiple culture-war issues, usually on the side of the political right. Greenwald claimed to be just asking questions about “what has become of the trans agenda.” Greenwald compared this to the “gay agenda” for marriage equality, ignoring that trans people were involved in that movement as well.

Greenwald criticized Chase Strangio for supporting Amazon’s temporary ban on Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier. Greenwald also mentioned promoting Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok:

“That account has undergone a very radical transformation., In the beginning, what Libs of TikTok used to do when I actually promoted it and helped it grow, it was neutrally curating TikTok videos that were designed to show two things:

Number one, the logical and inevitable conclusion of the most radical premises of gender ideology that people were being told they were essentially required to embrace in a way that I think oftentimes valorized rather than offered compassion and treatment for what actually are mental health problems.

And it was just illustrating the underbelly of this movement that was very illustrative of where these premises could actually lead if you take them literally and seriously.”

Greenwald then mentioned the issues of accommodating trans prisoners and trans healthcare for minors:

“A lot of female prisoners are complaining that they feel threatened by having preoperative trans women put into prison cells with them. Are you going to say that’s not a problem? There’s a lot of spaces where cis women are saying ‘We feel uncomfortable, we feel threatened, we feel at risk if we’re in spaces where preoperative trans women have the ability to come in and be naked and be around our daughters. Is that beyond the realm of debate, whether those concerns need to be addressed? And on the issue of kids, the New York Times just this week, Emily Bazelon – a writer in very good liberal standing, she’s a very good liberal – wrote an article about the debate that is taking place within the medical community and among healthcare providers about what kinds of scrutiny should be necessary before you diagnose a child with gender dysphoria. Is mere self-declaration sufficient at the age of 5? These debates are raging.”

Greenwald added:

“This is why I’m torn. I do support absolutely the cause of trans rights, in the sense that adults should absolutely have the right not just to have access to treatment but to have the full panoply of legal equality. And I think society should be persuaded to treat them with the utmost respect, because there’s nothing inherently immoral about being trans, any more than there is about being gay and lesbian. That is my foundational belief. The problem is that the worst elements on each side are feeding on one another. And I think this is often true with the culture war. Both sides need one another. And you can say it’s blaming the victim, but I don’t think you can doubt that there has become this element of the more vocal and fanatical activists who aren’t interested in persuading, but interested inn condemning. And you’re going to create a backlash if you do that.”

References

Higgins, Eoin (2025). Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left. Bold Type Books, ISBN 978-1645030461

Higgins, Eoin (August 10, 2022). What happened to Glenn Greenwald? The former trans ally now sides with right wing transphobia. Salon https://www.salon.com/2022/08/08/what-happened-to-glenn-greenwald-the-former-trans-ally-now-sides-with-right-wing-transphobia/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Republished as Glenn Greenwald’s Transition to Ally of Bigotry. LA Progressive https://www.laprogressive.com/the-media-in-the-united-states/glenn-greenwald-ally-of-bigotry

Stern, Marlow (June 13, 2022). Chelsea Manning Is Putting the Pieces Back Together. The Daily Beast https://www.thedailybeast.com/chelsea-manning-is-putting-the-pieces-back-together/

Scher, Bill (October 26, 2021). Why the ACLU Is Right, and Glenn Greenwald Is Wrong, on Schools Addressing Transgender Students. Washington Monthly https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/10/26/why-the-aclu-is-right-and-glenn-greenwald-is-wrong-on-schools-addressing-transgender-students/

Wakefield, Lily (February 25, 2021). Journalist Glenn Greenwald faces backlash after falsely claiming ‘decrease’ in lesbians is due to trans men. PinkNews https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/02/25/glenn-greenwald-gallup-poll-journalist-lesbian-population-trans-men-twitter-backlash/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Tani, Maxwell; Baragona, Justin (October 29, 2020). Glenn Greenwald Resigns From The Intercept, Claims He Was Censored. The Daily Beast https://www.thedailybeast.com/glenn-greenwald-resigns-from-the-intercept-claims-he-was-censored

Press release (February 10, 2014). Welcome to The Intercept. First Look Media https://www.firstlook.media/theintercept/2014/02/10/welcome-intercept

Coverage in anti-trans press

Zilber, Ariel (June 13, 2022). Chelsea Manning opens up about rift with ‘dangerous’ Glenn Greenwald. New York Post https://nypost.com/2022/06/13/chelsea-manning-details-rift-with-dangerous-glenn-greenwald/

Sacks, David (November 10, 2021). Creators Assemble! Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Briahna Joy Gray, Antonio García Martínez, and Andray Domise Sign Exclusive Partnerships with Callin. Callin Blog https://medium.com/callin-blog/creators-assemble-e71b77b3749a

Selected writing by Greenwald

Greenwald, Glenn (February 24, 2021). Some really fascinating findings in this big new Gallup survey on Americans identifying as “LGBT.” https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1364617687423471621

Books

Greenwald, Glenn (2021). Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Haymarket Books; ISBN 978-164259-450-8

Greenwald, Glenn (2014). No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company, ISBN 978-1-62779-073-4

Greenwald, Glenn (2011). With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company, ISBN 978-0-8050-9205-9

Greenwald, Glenn (2008). Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. Random House, ISBN 978-0-307-40802-0

Greenwald, Glenn (2007). A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Crown / Random House, ISBN 978-0-307-35419-8

Greenwald, Glenn (2006). How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. Working Assets / Publishers Group West, ISBN 978-0-9779440-0-2

Media

Brad Polumbo with Glenn Greenwald (July 1, 2023). Pride Month 2023 has been a DISASTER 🤡 (ft. Glenn Greenwald). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmvrOTRGYSg

(July 7, 2023). [clip] Hysterical LGBT alarmists need to calm down 🙄 (ft. Glenn Greenwald). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1PXdNztoeY
(July 6, 2023). [clip] Shawn Mendes demands CENSORSHIP of trans debate?! (ft. Glenn Greenwald). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MwO_QKmkag
(July 5, 2023). Glenn Greenwald: The Old Gay Rights Movement is GONE! (interview). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8SKAlefwnc

System Update with Glenn Greenwald (Feb 17, 2023). [clip] Elite Meltdown: Hundreds Sign Letter Denouncing NY Times’ Trans Coverage | SYSTEM UPDATE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgv1HDJ0JlI

System Update with Glenn Greenwald and Katie Herzog (January 24, 2023). How the Toxic Debates Around Trans Issues May Be Improving, with Katie Herzog | SYSTEM UPDATE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcM31UEGB0Y

The Megyn Kelly Show with Megyn Kelly, Glenn Greenwald, Carrie Prejean, and Britt Mayer (January 17, 2023). Hunter Hypocrisy, and Trans vs. Girls Rights, with Glenn Greenwald, Carrie Prejean, and Britt Mayer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdwrQSOU6bc

System Update with Glenn Greenwald and Christopher Rufo (June 30, 2022). Interview with Christopher Rufo: What Are His Core Beliefs and Goals Regardig Race and LGBT Debates? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKRDoc9OroU

The Vanguard with Zac Polson, Gavin Miller-Broomfield, and Glenn Greenwald (June 23, 2022). LIVE with Glenn Greenwald – Hashing Out Our Disagreements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxa1GfzHW2A

(June 23, 2022). [clip] Debating Glenn Greenwald – “The Trans Agenda” and Libs of TikTok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK33inhhjn4

Holberg Prize with Simon Critchley, Judith Butler, Cornel West, and Glenn Greenwald (December 4, 2021). The 2021 Holberg Debate on Identity Politics: J. Butler, C. West, G.Greenwald and S. Critchley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv-TXOfI7vg

The Majority Report with Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland (November 1, 2021). Glenn Greenwald’s Quest For Conservative Viewers Mirrors Dave Rubin’s ‘Why I Left The Left’ Playbook. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9pbX6t2hKE

System Update with Glenn Greenwald and Katie Herzog (March 18, 2021). The Role of Claimed LGBT Identity in Political Discourse – System Update with Glenn Greenwald. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt8BZzLFpzA

Glenn Greenwald (February 25, 2021). Trending as a Transphobe and Biphobe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXXJoOsdoNE

Andrea Rovenski (February 25, 2021). Glenn Greenwald Goes On Transphobic Tirade On Twitter, Claims Bisexual People Don’t Exist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1eyp07yhrs

Fox News with Tucker Carlson and Glenn Greenwald (October 29, 2020). Glenn Greenwald on resigning from his own publication due to censorship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8pkCZBjgrk

The Joe Rogan Experience with Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald (October 28, 2020). Joe Rogan Experience #1556 – Glenn Greenwald. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0rcLsoIKgA